Madoff’s Home in Palm Beach Sells for $5.65 Million

(Bloomberg) -- Bernard Madoff’s Palm Beach, Florida, home sold today for $5.65 million, a third less than its original asking price, the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement.

The five-bedroom, seven-bath property at 410 North Lake Way was listed for sale in September 2009 for $8.49 million. By August of this year, the price had been reduced to $6.5 million, according to real estate website Zillow.com.

The house is the last of three Madoff homes that the U.S. government sold to pay restitution to victims of his Ponzi scheme, the largest ever. Madoff is serving a 150-year sentence at a federal prison in North Carolina.

“We will continue to dispose of the remaining assets with the goal of receiving maximum gain for the victims of this crime,” Deputy U.S. Marshal Roland Ubaldo said in an e-mail today.

An auction of Madoff’s personal property, including jewelry, art and antiques, will be held in New York on Nov. 13, Ubaldo said. The items include a grand piano and a diamond ring of about 10 karats, he said.

The 8,753-square-foot (813-square-meter) Florida house was purchased in 1994 for $3.8 million under the name of Madoff’s wife, Ruth, according to the deed. Its appraised value was $9.4 million in 2008, Palm Beach County records show.

Madoff’s 3,000-square-foot home on Old Montauk Highway, on the east end of New York’s Long Island, sold in October 2009 for $9.41 million. His penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was purchased in May for $8 million, according to property website StreetEasy.com.

Corcoran Group, a New York-based brokerage, marketed the Palm Beach and Long Island homes for the Marshals Service, and represented the buyer of the Manhattan penthouse. Buyers for all three properties were selected by the Marshals Service. Ubaldo declined to identify the buyer of the Palm Beach property.